N'wraenomicon

Lovecraft dug deep into history for the inspirations for his stories. Or entities that go back deep in history reached far to inspire him. It's hard to say which. We know from his personal letters that he and his circle of writing associates laughed about how seriously some readers thought he believed the things he was writing. I'll trust his word that it was all just fun storytelling...on the surface. I think it was Stephen King who once said, "Fiction is the truth inside the lie." He might have been quoting someone else, but I'm pretty sure I read it from him, and it has stayed with me for years. Writing fiction often gives an author space to work out things they haven't recognized in themself. There are many reasons to believe Lovecraft didn't consciously believe the Old Ones actually exist, but also many reasons to believe pieces of what he created were manifestations of bigger things than just his own imagination. And maybe some of it was misguided gn...

I'm reading Illuminations , the new short story collection from Alan Moore. A lot of my answer to the questiin, "Are the Old Ones real?" can be found in one of the stories in that book. The book just came out this month, so I don't want to give away too much and spoil a whole story for people. I'll be careful. In one of the stories, there's a small detail of a conversation between two characters about a metal ball that is a puzzle. One of the characters explains there is a whole story involved about some kind of lizard that can, essentially, go into extremely long term hibernation. Centuries of hibernation. And the puzzle of the ball is trying to figure out whether or not it's true that one of those lizards is sleeping inside the ball. The story is set in a world that isn't clearly identified, but there's enough description of things and oddities in interaction between characters that the reader can tell it's not our world. So do these lizards ...

I enjoyed editing the colors and lighting to turn a very plain photo of my new ring into a photo more suited to the feeling I aim for with pictures on this blog. Yes, in case you're wondering, that is a replica of the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings . It took some work to get everything situated for the photo so that the Elvish inscription would show. It isn't obvious and disappears, leaving a plain gold band, if everything isn't just right. At least I don't have to hold it to a flame. So why am I writing about a Tolkien ring on a Lovecraft blog? Well, it isn't really a Lovecraft blog. It's a Yog-Sothothery blog. We can discuss all day whether or not it's fair to identify the Mythos with the name of the man who laid the groundwork when most of the creation has been done by other authors. We can avoid that by identifying it with the most famous Old One in the mythos, but we also know Lovecraft himself wanted it identified with Yog-Sothoth. In ...

From the beginning of the book The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep ,  by Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe: "Your modern man would rather disbelieve something than be lieve it. He likes to think he is cynical and hard-boiled, whereas he is the most credulous creature ever made. When he can't under stand a thing, like astronomy, or relativity, or finance, he believes anything you care to tell him, if you tell him with sufficient scien tific and financial trimmings. But the trouble is he can understand a sea serpent. He can visualize it. Therefore, he disbelieves it. His disbelief flatters his vanity, makes him think he is a superior fellow. Well, it doesn't make him a superior fellow. Any fool can disbe lieve in sea serpents..." -Archie Wills, Editor of The Victoria Daily Times , October 11, 1933

Math is not one of my strengths. A lot of people say that, and there is a while range of reasons why it may be so. There are serious problems with how we approach teaching math in schools. There's also an "attitude problem". Adults often display an attitude of, "No, it's not fun. Yes, it's hard. Quit whinin' and start studyin'!" That doesn't really encourage children to want to learn. Personally, I think math is fascinating! That's even true after years of adults confusing my dread of doing the schoolwork for not liking math. The biggest obstacle for me is that my ability to understand concepts hits a point where it is impaired by my limitations when it comes to arithmetic. I have a learning disability called dyscalculia. Even if math came easy to me, though, algebra probably would have been something I felt neutral about. It would have been a necessary class to acquire skills to move on to things I found more fascinating. I wish I had be...

Why do we generally only refer to fiction as "creative writing"? All writing is a creative process. Even text messages. Not every written message has an obvious creative process to it, but it's there. Communication is creative. I've been doing a lot of work in my own writing recently. I wouldn't say I'm finding specific inspiration in my dreams, but I have noticed my creative process becomes more focused, and more fruitful, as my dreams become more vivid and remembered more in the waking world. I pray for the Lake Monster to make things flow, and I get a flood of creativity! I have devotional training work to do for my religious practice. I have work to do within Yog-Sothothery. None of this is being forgotten or procrastinated. Because I am putting a lot of time and energy into my writing, though, I may have less of it to spend on documenting and reflecting on things in blog posts. Or, maybe I'll find even more of it. I'm just guessing at this point.

An interesting (I use that word a lot, because many things are interesting to me) thing happened twice while I was reading a book recently. The book was Peter Levenda's Dunwich . It's the second book in his Lovecraft Code  trilogy. Would I recommend it to fans of the Mythos? That's...hmm. I don't think I have a simple answer for that. I've been casually aware of Levenda's work for a long time, but hadn't read any of it until just a few years ago. Well...not anything he published under his own name. There was that one special book that pulled me into Lovecraft, Cthulhu, Eastern mysticism, and a lot of other topics I knew nearly nothing about before someone suggested it to me. That was over twenty years ago, which feels longer than it sounds. I'm at a point in my life where "twenty years ago" sounds like just a few minutes and feels like an eternity. Because of that book, I'm going to have a very personal favorable bias about anything that co...

My personal story of an experience with a Lake Monster is absolutely fascinating. Of course, I think it is. Who would claim to have a Lake Monster experience and then wave it off as being too casual and boring? A lot of what makes the story so fascinating, though, is a long trail of details that have revealed themselves in odd ways. Tonight is not the night for writing the entire story, but I have discovered another interesting detail. My Lake Monster experience ties very closely with the aquatic dinosaur Tylosaurus. No, I'm not claiming there's a physical live one out there somewhere. That would be too simple a story, and easily disproven. For now, all that's necessary to know is that this aquatic dinosaur is important to me, and that I recently been exploring thoughts of how Tylosaurus may or may not be some kind of appropriate representation of Father Dagon and/or Mother Hydra. I was reading more information about the dinosaur tonight, digging deeper into how this all co...

I'm not particular about restricting my knowledge of the Mythos to only Lovecraft's writing. That just...well, wouldn't work. Lovecraft's work laid a foundation, but the Mythos really exists because other writers added to it. Even that oversimplifies things. There are things commonly accepted as "part of the Mythos" that inspired Lovecraft. Does that make them "pre-Mythos"? Is it really that simple? Should any of it be seen as so simple? And yes, there are folks out there who do not accept the works of certain authors as being "true Mythos" because they feel those authors went too far from what Lovecraft intended. I disagree. There are works in the Mythos I don't like. Sometimes the focus of the work is boring to me. Sometimes the writing style doesn't appeal to me. I don't judge whether or not it belongs in the Mythos, though. Lovecraft isn't known for being the most accepting and inclusive person to walk the earth, but it ...

I've been working on a project that, at first glance, wouldn't seem to be related to my work in Yog-Sothothery. A deeper dive into how the project is developing shows several connections. I'm not ready to reveal details about the actual project yet, but I will say it combines multiple forms of art, language, and storytelling. It also gets into how broad "storytelling" can be. Stories, history, information. And these things are not just influences on the development of the project, but also messages that the project seeks to put out into the world. I think of how fictional stories are born from factual events, how fictional characters are inspired by the lives of people in the physical world. I think of the stories of Cthulhu channeling all kinds of weird information through artists. The way the fictional Necronomicon has had bits of information about it added to many stories by many authors. Folklore. Fairy tales. Written stories read to and by children that were ...

I'm in the process of reading all the Randolph Carter stories again. I know he's pretty much accepted as being Lovecraft's insertion of himself as a character, but I like Randolph Carter a lot more than I like Lovecraft. Maybe because he is "just a chatacter". We know nothing more about him than we needed to know for the stories being told. There's also the fact that the whole Silver Key thing really resonates with me. Keys have always been very magical objects to me, going all the way back to my early childhood. I simply cannot remember a time when keys weren't fascinating and, somehow, sacred. Combine that with a lot of me seeing things in those stories as being useful to refocus as metaphors for things I have experienced, and it's probably not really a mystery that Randolph Carter is an important character for me. The key is a very important object. I would say I'm considering making my own key, but I know I'm past "considering". T...

I've mentioned my dice a couple of times now.  This is the set I'm using.  Yes, it's a Mythos-themed set. That almost stopped me from buying them. My dice are devoted to a particular deity, and everything about this set was perfect for what I needed except for that Mythos connection. Which wouldn't really matter, except...well, look at mine. That symbol that takes the place of the largest number on each and every piece? Yeah. I don't keep them in the box they came in (though I did keep the box), but that stmbol is always there on each one. But there's a flow to everything that has drawn me toward Yog-Sothothery, so there's a story to this. I started with astragalomancy by using my old set on tabletop rpg dice. I haven't played a game they'd be needed for in, oh...too many years to figure out what number to attach. Those dice have their own story, though, and I've kept them all this time. Getting enough of a grasp on the basics of usin...